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Heavy Lifting From the Vaults: Lots of Allmans and Elvis on the Way

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Heavy Lifting From the Vaults: Lots of Allmans and Elvis on the Way

By Allan Kozinn June 13, 2014 11:44 amJune 13, 2014 11:44 am

Classic albums by the Allman Brothers Band and Elvis Presley are to be given expanded reissues that, depending on your level of fascination with these musicians, are either textbook examples of bloated archival sprawl or something like perfection.

The Allman Brothers’ label, Universal, is revisiting “At Fillmore East,” a live album recorded at the East Village hall the weekend of March 12 and 13, 1971, and released that July as a double LP. It captures the group in its original lineup – with Duane Allman and Dickie Betts as the dueling guitar soloists, Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny Johanson sharing the drumming, Berry Oakley on bass and Gregg Allman on keyboards – jamming at its most inspired and virtuosic. Fans have long regarded it as one of the peaks – many would say the peak – of the Allmans’ discography

The original album compiled recordings from the weekend’s four concerts (early and late shows each night), but given the Allmans’ penchant for jamming at length, the set includes only seven songs, among them a 23-minute version of “Whipping Post.” Other recordings from the weekend have turned up in compilations over the years, as have recordings from a fifth show, the Fillmore’s closing concert, on June 27, 1971. In the 1990s the Allmans released expanded versions of the album – “Fillmore Concerts” and “At Fillmore East (Deluxe Edition)” – which drew on both the March and June shows, but were each confined to two CDs.

Now Universal is putting out everything – all five shows, 37 selections in all – as “The 1971 Fillmore East Recordings,” a six-CD set due on July 29.

Not to be outdone, Sony Legacy is releasing “That’s the Way It Is (Deluxe Edition)” – a mega-plus-size version of Elvis Presley’s 1970 album (originally a single LP), as well as the 1970 film of the same name. The new version, “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (Deluxe Edition)” will include eight CDs and two DVDs. Sony is calling it “the most ambitious Elvis Presley restoration package ever created,” and there is something to that, not least because Sony owns the audio and Warner Brothers owns the film. The album and film appear here together for the first time.

Moreover, sorting out the recordings themselves was a complicated matter. “That’s the Way It Is” was a hybrid album, with eight studio recordings, taped in Nashville in June 1970, and four live performances, recorded at shows in Las Vegas two months later. The film was part documentary, part concert film, and to keep things complicated it exists in two forms – the 1970 theatrical original and a recut, extended version released on DVD in 2001.

The sessions that produced the studio tracks actually yielded three full albums and a stack of singles, so Sony focused its archival trawl mostly on the live recordings, which are also the main focus of the film. Its solution: the first CD includes the original album, four songs released as singles and five studio outtakes. Discs 2 through 7 are devoted to six complete Las Vegas concerts, and Disc 8 includes 20 songs from the rehearsals. The DVDs include both versions of the film, as well as outtakes and a featurette, “Patch It Up: The Restoration of Elvis – That’s The Way It Is.” The set is due on Aug. 5.

A version of this article appears in print on 06/14/2014, on page C3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: The Allmans and Elvis Sally From the Vaults.